Application Migration Best Practices

Migrating your current apps to a new computing environment or the cloud can be an extremely versatile idea. However, it can also seem very frightening, since you might be worried about a lack of compatibility and other similar issues. That brings the question, what kind of best practices should you have in play whenever you are migrating apps to a new environment?

Training your team

Making sure that everyone has the technical capabilities needed to migrate and also prepare everything is very important. You want your users to be 100% ready for this change, so adequate training and tutorials can make a difference. Engaging and also training employees will reduce a lot of the stress and issues, while also streamlining the way you work.

Assess the new environment

You want to see how different the new environment is and what changes you can make to it. Most of the time, new environments might require app changes. Documenting all of that and making those changes before migrating can ease the process and remove a lot of headaches.

Creating backups

You need to have a backup of the old system/app in place. That way, if anything goes wrong, you can revert to it. While it’s a rare situation, you can never be too safe. Having a set of backups in place can be extremely efficient, and it will give you the opportunity to focus on a proper app migration.

Automate some of the processes

In some cases, automation can be great as well. You can speed up some transfers and tasks if you automate them. That way, you can focus on making app changes or optimizing the app for the new environment. It’s a lot better when compared to migrating your app the way it is and figuring out what’s wrong later on.

Test things out

You can also perform a quick test to see how the app works in the new environment. Testing can be a great way to narrow down problems and see what you might need to change. Making those changes is extremely helpful, because even with a single test you can speed up the transfer by hours or even days. 

Creating a deployment document

It can be very strange to figure out what was changed and how the migration process went. Having a deployment document will help you narrow down all the steps you must take in order to finalize the migration. It will help eliminate a lot of potential issues, while removing any confusion.

These best practices are a must-have whenever you want to start the app migration process. In general, you want to be very well organized and ensure that your team will know exactly what to do, what to change and also how to deploy the apps to the new environment. Automation can speed things up, and you also want to restore and configure everything once the process is finished. It’s an excellent opportunity to help ensure the migration process is highly convenient, without hampering the efficiency of your apps!